Trial of Passion (33 page)

“I don't know what the standard of comparison is.” I add more sticks to my recalcitrant fire: Its impotence seems too apt a metaphor for my own. I laugh softly, though at myself.

“I'd say
her
standards were pretty low. I'm sorry if that sounds nasty, but that's how I feel.”

She is giving me licence to let go, to unlock, to open the gates of anger. And a few months ago I might have done so, but I realize there is no steam left to blow; all that repressed fury with which I arrived on Garibaldi Island has somehow dissipated and, like this fire, flickers only feebly.

“She gave me my freedom. I hope she is happy with her new lover.”

Margaret sips her coffee, but keeps her penetrating grey eyes fixed to mine, digging in, excavating for hidden information. “It sounds as if you were too much in love with her, Arthur.”

“Well, actually . . . no.”

“No?”

“I thought I was in love. It was something else. My daughter calls it masochism.”

“What do you call it?”

“Masochism.”

“Oh, come, Arthur. You're so hard on yourself.” She frowns. “Don't tell me you've never been in love.”

“Not until now.”

There is dead silence. She is looking at me with what I perceive to be utter astonishment. Good old Uncle Arthur, the wise adviser from next door, has made a social blunder of astronomic magnitude.

“What do you mean?”

“I am in love now. With you.”

She slowly puts down her coffee. I frantically return to my fire, busy myself by constructing a funeral pyre of cedar sticks and twigs. I apply a match. I pray to Vesta, life-giver, goddess of fire and the family hearth. I have just confessed my innermost feelings: Do I not have the right to a reaction?

“I think it's catching.”

What is? Yes, the fire. Flames leap up.

I find the strength to turn to her. She is sitting, hugging her knees. Why is she smiling? Does she find this so excruciatingly funny?

She takes one of my hands. Her expression is kindly: She will let me down as gently as she can. “You're so damn
shy.
That was such a lovely bouquet. A little scrambled up, though. You'll never be a flower arranger. I wanted to laugh.”

And she does laugh now, those tolling bells. I don't know what to make of this laughter. I listen to the fire spit and crackle. I am confused.

“They were lovely, really. I'm an old-fashioned romantic. Give me flowers every time.”

She seems to be taking the situation very well, and this has taken the edge off my embarrassment.

She continues to hold my hand. “Arthur, I don't know what to say. I'm just not experienced at this sort of thing. I have to work it through. I mean, I like you a
lot.
Okay?”

A lot. Yes, that will do.

“Remember our stupid little trial? When you burst into laughter at the end of it, I realized there was a great, warm-hearted man hiding behind . . . well, a stuffed shirt, that's what I thought. I've liked you ever since. You've grown on me. Not maybe to the point that, um, you'd like.” A long pause, then she utters one simple thrilling word: “Yet.”

I am borne away on a magic carpet of hope. More wondrous yet, she kisses me lightly on the lips. “I need some time,” she says. “Boy, I'm feeling really flustered.”

Still afloat, I am only distantly aware of a sound of a car engine, Margaret's dog barking.

“Oh, perfect,” Margaret says, rising, straightening her skirt.

I sit up, blinking.
Amor interruptus.
I am in a fog. Maybe this is not real: I am in a scene from
Switch,
where people keep coming inopportunely to the door. In this case, however, the visitor is at the window. From the flickering light of the fire, I make out a pair of greedy, beady eyes behind the pane. They quickly disappear as the house lights go on, and I hear a high male voice, the cordial nasal whine of Nelson Forbish. The press has arrived to cover this evening's events. Or he's snooping for news not fit to print.

I scramble to my feet too quickly, and suddenly feel quite woozy and out of breath, and I think: Oh, no, not now, not another stroke, and I reach out an arm and clutch the fireplace mantle.

Then it passes. It wasn't my heart, just the sudden lack of oxygen one suffers when standing too quickly.

I'm fine. I'm fine.

Forbish has somehow managed to invite himself in, and as I am settling into a chair by the fire, lighting my pipe, he balloons into view in the dining room, where he pauses to sniff at the leavings of our dinner as might a foraging dog.

“We've just finished eating,” says Margaret, who emerges from behind him, making a face at me, miming horror. “But there's some extra dessert. I made a panful of apple crumble.”

“Thanks, but I just ate myself,” Forbish says. “Maybe one. To be sociable.”

“One was what I planned to offer you, Nelson.” Forbish has doffed his porkpie, and fiddles with the rim. “Sorry to interrupt your nice evening and all, Mr. Beauchamp, but I was looking all over for you. Your phone was busy all day, so I checked your place, figured you were over here even though the lights were all off —”

“To the point, Nelson.” I am struggling to try to remain solemn.

“I was wondering if you could give me a lift into Vancouver tomorrow. I have to do a run for supplies.”

“I don't see why not. I'm taking my truck. I have recently had it made street legal. I have plenty of room.”

“You'll need it,” says Margaret, who is also working hard to keep a straight face. She hands Forbish his dessert on a paper plate, a hint her gift of apple crumble is intended as take-out food. But he stands his ground.

“So what's up with you folks?” he asks. “I see you're having an intimate evening. Together.”

“We've been having a strategy session,” I say. “Margaret will be running for trustee this fall. I am managing the campaign.”

“Maybe I should do an interview.”

“Some time later, Nelson, not now.”

“Mmm, that's good, even without ice cream. Should be an interesting trial, hey, Mr. Beauchamp?”

“Feel free to attend, if you have the stomach for it.”

“And he has,” Margaret says. She starts laughing, then claps a hand over her mouth.

Poor Forbish looks hurt. “I can't, I got too many things on my plate.” But that plate has long been empty. “That was mighty delicious apple crumble, even though you make fat jokes at my expense. Fair enough, but I'm a big eater and that makes me an expert. I've sat at a lot of tables on this island, and I can honestly say yours is the best.”

“Just the best on Garibaldi, Nelson?”

“My newspaper may want to endorse your candidacy.”

“God, Nelson, take another piece and get out of here.”

Forbish, giggling, plucks another handsome helping from the pan.

Margaret remains helpless with laughter awhile after he leaves. “Yes,” she says, “one of those treasured moments.”

We return to our fire, to our coffees and our own abandoned desserts. I natter on about my past: life before Garibaldi. I think of it now as a little life, narrow, reclusive, focused on my dreary work as
defender of the base, the corrupt, the craven. I bring Margaret up to date on the O'Donnell case, a subject guaranteed to entertain her, hooked as she is on this
opera levant.
She peppers me with questions — she would love to take some of it in, but she has her animals, and the fall fair is next weekend; blue ribbons are to be won.

We talk into the night. Candles gutter out. Nighthawks bleat and owls coo. I remind her I must borrow her alarm clock — I must be up by seven or so. She makes more coffee. She orders up some poetry. I recite a Shakespeare sonnet. She says she loves my voice; it must work wonders in the courtroom. Courtroom? What courtroom? The courts seem as remote as the Kalahari Desert.

In sweet sorrow we finally part — at the unheard-of hour of three o'clock in the morning. She bestows another kiss, more lingering than the first.

I return to my house still savouring the warm softness of those lips.
Yet
, she said. She's not ready. Yet.

In bed, I toss for another hour: Caffeine and love's adrenalin combine to keep sleep at bay. When it comes, my dreams again lack the customary motif of shame and chains, and nakedness. Instead, an absurd panto featuring our hero struggling through a desert of insecurity and doubt towards an ever-receding Margaret Blake. But as she beckons, an obelisk rises from the sands, an artifact from a civilization long thought dead.

Nicholas Braid's upwardly mobile family has recently moved to a high-mortgage zone in West Point Grey: stately houses, sedate, tree-lined streets, tranquil but for the unrelenting growl of mowers, weed trimmers, and hedge clippers. Why do men pause at these tasks to stare as I drive by? Why do mothers call their children into the house? One would think they had never before seen come rattling down their street a purple, rusting 1969 Dodge pickup with the passenger door held on by a rope and bearing a bearded hayseed and
his elephantine sidekick, the voyeur Nelson Forbish in a food-stained porkpie hat. Somehow — the mechanics of this remain confusing to me — he has not only persuaded me to lend him the truck for his return to the island but has also cadged an invitation for lunch at my daughter's. Her response when informed by telephone: “Oh, we can handle one of your island characters for an afternoon.”

As we pull into the driveway, Nicholas strides out to greet me, but stalls as he takes the measure of Forbish wiggling from the truck. Yes, here to break bread among the Braids is one of those very Garibaldi yokels Nicholas counselled me to beware.

He brings his son forward, but slightly shelters him. “Another Nick. Say hello to Mr. Forbish. Arthur, I have some of that non-alcohol beer you like. The back terrace, gentlemen? Deborah made some appetizers.”

One would expect the word “appetizers” to send Forbish rocketing to the back terrace, but he stays behind with Nicky.

“And how are the markets, Nicholas?”

“Bullish. Made the right guesses, I think. Pulled back from the Brown Group just in time. Heard about their little crisis, Arthur? Down in Guyana. Whole mining operation shut down. Cyanide spill. Got into a river. All the piranhas have gone belly up. Looking at a fifty-million-dollar clean-up bill. A certain witness for the prosecution isn't going to be in a good mood.”

Deborah, presiding over her canapés, squeals when she sees me. “My God! You look like Robinson Crusoe on a bad hair day.”

“Wait'll you see Man Friday,” says Nick.

“Jeans, work shirt, those ugly yellow suspenders. You'd
better
get a haircut.”

“Ah, well, all my regalia is at the office. I have an appointment with Roberto tomorrow at nine. One is not to worry.”

“Your trial starts at ten.”

“Oh, nothing will happen without me. The judge is a patient man and a friend.”

But is there not some fear that Wally Sprogue, with his newly trained sensitivity to women, will bend over backwards to the female complainant? (The trial has switched on in my mind. It has been doing this all day, flickering like a badly connected light.)

While Nicholas goes off to tend to his other guest, my daughter draws me onto a sunny patch of lawn to make closer physical inspection. “Actually, you look great, Dad. Trimmed right down.”

I beam. “Observe.” I demonstrate Snake Creeps Down, the latest tai chi movement I have mastered. “The mind and body are one, and I am at peace. I'm not the man I used to be.”

Deborah looks at me uncertainly.

As I pull my pipe and tobacco from a jacket pocket, the little plastic bag with marijuana cigarettes slips out, too, and I barely catch it. I had forgotten it was there — Margaret had returned it last night.

“I'll say you're not the man you used to be. Grass. I gave that up at eighteen. Jesus, Dad, what do you think you're doing, discovering the 1960s or something?”

“How embarrassing.”

“Well? Explain yourself.” But she finds it hard to be stern; she is laughing.

“Caught in the act.”

“I'll say. Second childhood. Are you stoned right now?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, there's something about you. You're all so bright-eyed.”

“I am happy for the first time in my life.” I light my pipe and blow a little smoke ring.

“Since Mother left you. I always knew you'd be happier when you were free. Never thought you'd turn out like
this.
A post-generational, long-haired hippie freak.” But she is still grinning, happy for me. “I was shocked when I heard about it, her and that Roehlig, and then I thought, how wonderful, you are finally out from under her.”

Abruptly she changes the subject, cross-examining me about
Margaret, and though I respond evasively (I fear my daughter is not ready to hear her flower-child father has fallen in love), Deborah cuts to the quick.

“Are you courting her?”

Forbish rounds the bend, scratching his belly, heading for the appetizers.

“Caught your dad there in a dark house with her last night.”

“Dad!”

I redden. “It was all quite proper, my dear. Candlelight dinner.”

“Must've lasted a long time,” Forbish says. “Hear he didn't get home till three in the morning.”

“You rogue, Dad.” Deborah claps her hands in delight.

Nicholas comes from the house with a portable phone: It's Augustina.

“Jonathan called in. He's at his therapist's office. Last-minute crisis counselling, I guess. He sounded pretty whacked out.”

“Sober?”

“I think so.”

The tortured wretch has kept his bargain with me and earned his defence. Well, I will try to do him justice. (I am moving into trial mode, I can sense it.)

Thanks for this. I'll pay double overtime.